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Your Death Revisited, A Montaignesque§ One Way ‘Conversation’

Your classical guitar playing was beautiful and likely you practiced and maybe even performed Joaquín Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto De Aranjuez’. Here is an extraordinary jazz piano duet performance by Chick Corea and Hiromi. Perhaps you will enjoy the virtuosos piano playing.

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Epistle #4

Dear Claude: An Epistle #4

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§Montaignesque: Written in the joy and inquisitive manner of the Michel Eyquem de Montaigne †1592, creator of the first book of 'Essays’. He didn’t limit his curiosity and with deep humbleness looked closely at every thing from whether or not the consciousness of the cat was playing with him rather than the other way around. He has been an influential thinker since the 16th century, despite two centuries of Catholic censure for daring to think that animals may have consciousness or souls. To read him on-line (in an older English translation, see: Essays Of Michel De Montaigne tr by Charles Cotton Edited by William Hazlitt.

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Dear Claude:

It has been a year since my first epistle to you. I was inspired to write that one in large part because of the sacred energy and respect that the Oaxaceños hold for their ancestors. And today’s epistle is again initiated largely, although not solely, from the inspiration of their respectful energy. That and, perhaps, the continuation of my own path to clear out the ancestral and societal energies that are hindering my ability to be fully alive in this body at this space-time moment. The previous epistles have all been steps in that direction.

Note that this has become an ‘improper’ epistle, as I have found myself editing it significantly and expanding its scope over a few days, hence ‘Montaignesque’ in the title. It has ‘bent’ itself to include psychology, which you had an interest in and that you felt that you had some competence with. Also I’ve included references to untold histories. And history you were very interested in, having worked yourself into a nervous breakdown to get a masters degree as a mature student in Russian history while supporting four teenagers and an unemployed spouse. And I well remember the plethora of WWII books and the excitement you felt with The Spear of Destiny which combined occult ‘stuff’ with history. I wonder if you and your friend John would be excited or saddened or dismissive that likely most of that history you had talked about with such intensity was mostly false, beyond battle details perhaps.

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Koan on The Mountainside, Where No-Mind Wants to Go, or Go Visit Ghosts of Parents Passed

In the previous two Sundays the koan meditation group that recently I joined, Flower Mountain Zen, spent some time exploring the feeling-energy of Los Días de Los Muertos’s fundamental belief in the ‘reality’ of ‘ancestral spirits’. I think you spent some time with koans, although with my current understanding I suspect that for you it was likely mostly an intellectual exercise and not the bodily experience that koan awakenings are designed to create. Koans are to initiate and perhaps even propagate true incorporation of body with that which isn’t the body and that which the mind has no capacity to properly understand. Such a vague memory! And, to be honest and complete, I had rather casually dismissed koans in my twenties because I had intellectually categorised them and mistook that mindless action of understanding as being mindful when in reality koans are beyond the idea of mindfulness as is currently largely understood.

Anyway, the koan group’s guide shared her own experiences of conversing with her dead father and grandmother. She added that she has no conversation with her mother’s ‘spirit’. Her mother had struggled and committed suicide at a relatively young age, having cut off significant family communication before her death.

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A One-Way Conversation on Things Without Substance 

And so I enter this epistle with the awareness that I am writing to you as a means to explore and express aspects of my experience in life. Life as an oddly contradictory spelling of ‘death’, perhaps. And that this epistle is one-way, therefore not a conversation. And as I write I wonder if you, in whatever shape you may have — if you even have one — will find it interesting in some way as I look to you and our relationship for inspiration and release. Although I have become more and more alive to life lived without expectations about what the results of my action of this moment may bring, be it an essence of healing nourishment or an undigestible non-medicinal emetic. My effort is to bring clarity and alignment of thought, speech, action and spirit in this space-time moment so that ultimately the result of my actionless-action (Taoist Wu-Wei) will be life-affirming in some unknown and perhaps unknowable way that is outside of egoistic grippiness and need to control the outcome. 

And, despite that, now I wonder if it might be possible to open a door to a conversation with you. Perhaps that is an effect of Los Días de Los Muertos. And I’m smiling as I write that because the more deeply I go into the exploration of ‘the meaning of existence’, as if that is something that even has the possibility of being found, I find that I am resting into a subject-to-change awareness that continuity of the spirit of Guy-as-I-perceive-this-Guy-thing-to-be is unlikely. I know that this flies in the experience of the Spiritualist Church, of which you focused the last few years of your life-energy before dying very young. Your young death of the bodily self suggests to me that the energy of that church, for you anyway, was more enervating than invigorating: it did not energise your life. Or, in old psychological language, it did not release the libido from your unconscious into energy to give vigour to your expression of life. 

As a teenage church attendee, dragged to it by you and your wife, I went along with it as a kind of truth at the time. What I saw and experienced included a time when I talked with, through a medium, the earth-bound spirit of a teenage graduate. He asked to talk to me specifically and he came to realise that he had died in a high school graduation day a car crash several years earlier. This experience, and my witnessing others similar to it, suggested that whatever the Spiritualist Church had tapped into had some semblance of ‘truth’. To be honest, I suspect that whatever was going was far more complex than the simple description ‘rescue circle’ that that activity was given. 

Much later I would read of Carl Jung’s own encounters with the active spiritualism that was a part of his extended family’s accepted experience. He expressed his acute curiosity about what the heck was going on, really going on, in a very early essay that critically questioned his experiences in ‘spiritualist circles’. See ‘On The Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena’. It was that unflinching and dedicated curiosity, I am sure, that was the sustaining energy that kept him questioning and questing for what might be ‘true’ until his death in 1961, shortly after my birth.

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Libido. Music: Andrew Bird - You Woke Me Up

Resting Comfortably into a Truth as Religious Spiritual By-Pass, Loss of Libido and Curiosity

It seems to me that settling into a truth, especially a comfortable one, is tantamount to ‘loss of curiosity’. It strikes me now, as I write that, that that is likely more-or-less equivalent to what Freud and Jung called ‘loss of libido’, or Nietzsche’s life-energy. In their efforts to align the then nascent study of psychology with the so-called truth of Newtonian ‘scientific’ principles, they adopted psychological jargon and theories around mechanical energy. Here is Jung’s interesting look at death and libido for example: ‘Experiencing the Mortificatio: Jung on Grief, Grieving and Mourning’. (With this realisation I find it very interesting that one of the first things Jung would say to a new analysand was ‘Can you reconnect with your religion?’ This is a curious something that I may explore in the future.)

And very likely this is what Gautama was inferring when he said that he hesitated to teach what his enlightenment had shown him, which was that blah-blah truths about God and origins are a big, perhaps even the, distraction from being. I’ll paraphrase and expand on his thought: it is clear to me now that an ultimate purpose of a ‘religion’, in whatever guise, is to remove us from personal responsibility and the opportunity to engage in appropriate eccentric action by removing curiosity/libido and replacing it with ‘truth’. For that to work well, a part of ‘truthing' requires disembodiment practices because not only does the body not lie — being alive in the present space-time moment does not allow for that — the body knows what is untrue and is not deceived by what is false. The mind, on the other hand, chases after fool’s gold with its delight in delusion and so we live in an age of distraction, to paraphrase Neil Postman, which is really a kind way to say we live deluded lives.

Here are Stephen Batchelor’s ideas that step in this direction in his exploration as an atheist-Buddhist:

‘Our old religious and moral traditions,’ writes Don Cupitt in The Great Questions of Life (2005), ‘have faded away, and nothing can resuscitate them. That is why a tiny handful of us are not liberal, but radical, theologians. We say that the new culture is so different from anything that existed in the past that religion has to be completely reinvented. Unfortunately, the new style of religious thinking that we are trying to introduce is so queer and so new that most people have great difficulty in recognising it as religion at all.’

Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist; The Great Questions of Life. Music: REM - Losing My Religion 

Much of what Siddhattha Gotama taught must have struck his contemporaries as equally ‘queer’ and ‘new’. At the age of eighty, in the final year of his life, he was denounced to the Vajjian parliament in Vesali by a former monk called Sunakkhatta, a man who had once served as his attendant. Sunakkhatta declared, ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him, and when he teaches this Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practices it only to the ending of pain.’ On being told of this criticism, Gotama remarked: ‘Sunakkhatta is angry and his words are spoken out of anger. Thinking to discredit me, he actually praises me.’

Much of what Gotama said was so at odds with the conventional religious behaviour and language of the day that it remained baffling even for someone who had once been close to him. Just as the very idea of godless religion is contradictory and distasteful for many theists today, so Gotama's reasoned exposition of conditioned arising and the Four Noble Truths would have appeared bizarre and not even worthy of the name ‘religion’ for many of his contemporaries (p182-3 Confession of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor).

I would extend both Batchelor’s and Cupitt’s thinking to a movement that Gautama was likely hoping to see, which is the actual end of religion, because he recognised that it was a prison of disembodiment and mindless truthing that exacerbates suffering.

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Libido, Curiosity, Zombies and Puthujjana, the Subtle Distinction Between Truth and Kindness

I hadn’t thought of that before, that connection between curiosity and libido. Thank you, Claude, for the inspiration! And does that count as an element of or perhaps a step towards a ‘conversation’?

And wow, does that idea align with my understanding or perception of the difference between convidiana ’zombies/normies’ and questioners and/or seekers: curiosity. The epithets ‘zombies’ or ’normies’ seem harsh and yet has an accuracy of feeling that really makes finding another adjective difficult for me, even after an extended search. Even Gautama used an adjective to describe the unawake: puthujjana or pṛthagjana an unawakened person who could be a monk, a leader or teacher, etc. (Many Buddhist and yoga centres, for example, unkindly in their delusion closed their hearts and doors to uninjected people, for example.) The awake or aware person, ārya-pudgala in Sanskrit, has reached the highest stages of realisation of Buddha’s four stages of the supramundane path. This is in contrast to the sleeping pṛthagjana who are bound to the mind’s fixation on the delusions of crude earthly truths largely focused on and/or bound to the dualities of pleasure-pain, mine-yours(others), freedom-constriction and life-death.

‘Deluded’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘wilfully blind’ are equally applicable and harsh. And I have read all of them, and far worse, from people frustrated with the total zombiehood many experience from family, friends, associations, health-care professional of all types and co-workers. There is a certain lack of energy, an odd quality of lifelessness that the completely uncurious often have, even when animatedly expressing their anger towards the uninjected. And there is, of course, a range of curiosity or bounds to that curiosity that people have from total zombie to a normie who is curious about sports, Biblical ‘truths’, celebrity and the like. They look to their community to tell them where curiosity is okay, what is strictly defined limit of what it is possible to be curious about which also creates a deadness in their eyes. As convidiana revealed, anyone who questioned the wrong things was instantly de-friended, de-familied, de-jobbed, de-associated, de-health-cared, defamed, debarred, denied, detained or otherwise demoted from being human and subsequently forced into being a member of the undeserving.

Gautama has firmly directed us to be kind, and perhaps I could use ‘puthujjana’ instead of ‘zombie/normie’ in that direction, except almost no-one would understand it. Hmmmm. And puthujjana does not capture the feeling of threat that Yoshiko and I and others felt and experienced in Canada under WEF-Puppet Trudeau’s ramped up rhetoric with pretty overt threats, some of which were acted on, to the financial and physical security of the uninjected. This was a world-wide experience. ‘Zombie’ strikes me as a good description, perhaps with the possibility of there being the truly active zombies who, like was done at least once, shot a person dead who didn’t wear a mask. Or the passive zombies who by their inaction allowed the tyranny and threat to grow here as it did in the 1930s Germany and as has happened often elsewhere throughout history.

And with hindsight it was what I observed with a strong feeling of dead and alive with my first ‘awakening’ experience: Mikhaila Peterson’s ‘Opposing View Episode’ with animated and passionate Dr. Mercola sharing his discoveries and a dead zombie Dr. Kamil speaking dead convid rhetoric from the CDC / pharmaceutical playbook. Since then often that is what I see: the true-blue convidian and the advanced radical progressive humanists screaming their victimhood ideological truth with dead eyes. Purely subjective, of course.

Yes, it is a curious challenge of language, to see when a description has moved from accurate to hurtful.

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An Inquiry into the Death of Curiosity and of the Curious 

It seems that with the death of curiosity comes a need for self-righteous truthing that is quite happy to kill the threatener to that narrated and guided ‘truth’. And provides the ‘required’ death-for-security to be easily rationalised and justified as an act against an undeserving who is a threat. Not that the ‘threat’ is required to rationalise killing the underserving, as was done with the indigenous and  slaves, for example. And yet the threat makes it easier, as was done against witches, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Moslems, the homeless, women, etc.

I am curious about the range of ‘safe’ topics and fascinated by who will remain wilfully blind to one or more of our most popular and powerfully propagandised truths, such as the efficacy and safety of covid injections, the illegality and immorality of Israel’s willingness to kill Palestinians as ‘just animals’, the illegality and immorality of Palestinian terrorist to use people, especially women and children as bullet vests, the possibility that vaccines are Turtles All The Way Down, the significant role of wealthy ‘Jews’ in the creation and expansion of sugar-slavery,

the false narratives of the first and second world wars that comprise our official history, 9/11 delusion, JFK’s death by CIA, the secret use of venom in vaccines and water, and… Well the list is pretty endless.

Claude, did you close down your curiosity? First with the hope, perhaps, that if you achieved a full intellectual understanding of contemporary Russian history that you would get … what? Completion? An intellectualised nirvana? Did you have enough courage to see the truth of communist Russia as a slaughter house, or turn your curiosity when it went against your socialist ideology. And/or did you close down your curiosity with the Spiritualist Church as a truth-trap about life and death?

It is a funny association that just came to me. Buddhist teacher, scholar and yogi, Michael Stone described what he says often happens to the truly dedicated yogi or yogini at around seven to ten years of ‘true’ effort with, in particular, the Yamas and the Niyamas. These are the core or heart to ‘true’ yoga, because they are the foundation on which integration of thought, speech and action into joyful kindness in this moment are built. Stone says that an epiphany happens around that time which reveals to the yogi/yogini the full depth of the renunciation the spirit of yoga is asking of them. This often freaks the student enough that they withdraw back from the true curiosity required to advance their practice. Instead they retire their humour to seriously dedicate themselves to becoming an expert on a particular ‘safe’ intellectually-based, or perhaps obscure physically or breath-based, aspect of yoga. They delimit their curiosity into something safe because it has the mask of being under their control. (~56:30 “In that Lump of Flesh and Bones” my paraphrase.)

I am surprised that I have bent into the side roads that include psychology and religion. And then I remembered, just now, that you felt you had good psychological understanding or insight and yet were completely baffled when you took actual psychology courses at the university when you were a mature student keenly seeking the truth of the Russian Revolution. As I write that I actually have an image of you working through some kind of practice psychology test and you confessed to having simply resorted to guessing through most of it.

And of course I think you were ‘stuck on’ Freud and his Oedipus Complex Theory, the respected (eugenicist and misopaed) sex investigator Alfred Kinsey and other behaviouralists like B.F. Skinner. I could be wrong about the latter, not about Freud and Kinsey, which is quite clear in my fragmented memory. And so here I am citing Jung, who I don’t remember ever hearing about in the household despite the copy of The I Ching you possessed had within it the extended and fascinating foreword by Jung! (A reading of it is here.)

Were you a ‘true’ Freudian? I wonder. Virginia Woolf committed suicide despite her extensive Freudian analysis. The Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz comments that whenever she received new analysands who had undergone a Freudian analysis that the first and the most difficult hurdle was, paraphrased, to re-open their curiosity to the unknown. Victims of Freudian analysis came to her pre-knowing everything because Freud supplied a script that was a closed book. (Passim: the von Franz attribution is unreferenced because I no longer have her books in my library.)

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Bodyfullness of the Mind as Undeservedness’s Antidote

As the tangible discovery of actual mindfulness of my body, which is better understood as ‘bodyfullness of the mind’ continues to expand in my actual lived experience, I have come to an increased awareness that continuity of the soul is as unlikely as it is unnecessary. I know, I know, it is a cornerstone of perhaps most ‘spiritual’ religions, if not all, including most branches of Buddhism. And yet it is one that Gautama had eschewed as a kind of effective means by which the ego-mind can happily spiritually bypass what is to be done now to reduce the experience of suffering that is likely concomitant with the birth-experience into a life of somatic existence. That is his first ‘truth’, which I completely misunderstood when I was young and deluded by spiritualist new-age denialism.

On the Left, the Church of Bilderberg’s ‘Deserving’. Centre, example of yantra with key. On the right, the economic and religious church of the ‘Underserving’. (In this case, lorded over by a Jewish slave owner somewhere in the New World sugar-slave trade.)

In recent months, more pointedly since writing the ‘Obedience to Authority’ series last year,

Obedience to Authority: An Exploration, Part I

I now see clearly that religious expression, whether ‘spiritual’ or otherwise, quickly creates the deserving and the undeserving ‘clubs’. It would seem that the manifestation of a ‘religion’ by some hidden necessity of psychology or even yantric symmetry creates a psychic split that becomes manifest as some kind of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.  In Judaism, for example, it is made very explicit! See Tereza Coraggio’s continuing exploration of the Bible, Old and New Testament with an emphasis on the old.

Talmud Tricks & Torah Curses

Within Coraggio’s investigation she includes the following directives and rights bestowed by God on the deserving Jews to torture and extirpate the underserving Goy:

• Sanhedrin verse 59a – “Murdering Goyim is like killing a wild animal.” 

• Abodah Zara verse 26b – “Even the best of the Gentiles should be killed.”

• Schabouth Hag. verse 6d – “Jews may swear falsely by use of subterfuge wording.”

• Hilkkoth Akum X1 – “Do not save Goyim in danger of death.”

• Hilkkoth Akum X1 – “Show no mercy to the Goyim.”

• Choschen Hamm chapter 388, verse15 – “If it can be proven that someone has given the money of Israelites to the Goyim, a way must be found after prudent consideration to wipe him off the face of the earth.”

• Szaaloth-Utszabot, The Book of Jore Dia verse 17 – “A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them.”

• Baba Necia chapter 114, verse 6 – “The Jews are human beings, but the nations of the world are not human beings but beasts.”

• Simeon Haddarsen, folio 56-D – “When the Messiah comes every Jew will have 2800 slaves.”

• Nidrasch Talpioth, page. 225-L – “Jehovah created the non-Jew in human form so that the Jew would not have to be served by beasts. The non-Jew is consequently an animal in human form, and condemned to serve the Jew day and night.”

• Aboda Sarah 37a – “A Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated.”

• Tosefta. Aboda Zara B, 5 – “If a goy kills a goy or a Jew, he is responsible; but if a Jew kills a goy, he is not responsible.”

• Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 388 – “It is permitted to kill a Jewish denunciator everywhere. It is permitted to kill him even before he denounces.”

• Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat 348 – “All property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which, consequently, is entitled to seize upon it without any scruples.”

• Tosefta, Abda Zara VIII, 5 – “How to interpret the word ‘robbery.’ A goy is forbidden to steal, rob, or take women slaves, etc., from a goy or from a Jew. But a Jew is not forbidden to do all this to a goy.”

And Mikhaila Peterson was given a similar explication from the Moslem side towards the Jews. ‘The Truth About Islam | Mikhaila Peterson & Apostate Prophet.’

Buddhism has largely been the exception to that rule, as far as I can tell with limited research, with its emphasis on being kind. However I recently learned in The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, American Style by Dinty Moore they are not exempt!

And a late synchronicity. This afternoon I listened to Douglas Gabriel describe how the ‘big’ Mediterranean religions do that exact same thing: each have been given ‘God’s’ moral right to kill the other as members of the undeserving non-humans.  ’11/1/23 Build Back Babylon Better, Baby! Ww3 & 7Th Beast Kingdom.’

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Confirmation of Science and Economics as Our Current Big Religions

Music: Mumford and Sons - Where Are You Now?

Blaise Pascal wrote this with what I see now as a kind of naïvety that religion would be limited to arguments about ‘creation’, ‘soul’ and the continuity of the ego and the like. Angels on the head of pin or which god was strongest. It seems to me that perhaps the fundamental functioning principle of religion is to separate the undeserving from the deserving. For example Pascal and others of the so-called enlightenment like Voltaire did not see that reason would be used to create the secular religions of economics and science, which have become the world’s biggest religions by measure of morally justified human death and suffering. Even more easily and casually than so-called ‘proper’ religions, the masters of the religions of economics and science have easily relegated everyone on the planet as an economic undeserving — the current ‘useless meat eaters that are completely and more easily hackable by technology than they were by machetes.’ The economist, and eugenicist, John Maynard Keynes observed this:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectual influences are usually slaves of some defunct economist (p238, John Maynard Keynes, cited in The Tao of Abundance: Eight Ancient Principles for Abundant living by Laurence G. Boldt, Toronto: Penguin Arkana, 1999).

I explored this idea in an early essay. If curious you may enjoy the naïveté of my baby steps towards emancipation from economic religious totalitarianism:

Death By Freezing:

Question: When Is An Ideology Worth Dying Or Killing For?

At the time I hadn’t fully appreciated that scientism, science™, had replaced science. Later I read an important book that linked Christian religiosity with science that you might also find interesting. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention by David F. Noble. His argument wasn’t that science had become a religion. It was how Christianity underpinned science and technology. 

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Is This An Epistle to You? What Form Might that ‘You’ Have Taken in this Montaignesque Ramble?

I see that this has become a one-way conversation towards you. ‘You’. And to what extent would that ‘you’ be you? More likely it is a version of you created by my own energy energising the Universe. And how is that possible since I am comprised wholly of this Universe’s energy?

For some reason this brings to mind the ‘one-way’ experience that Jane Roberts had when she ‘dictated’ the ‘spirit’ of American psychologist William James. And that book became one of the most important books I read, and that I read several times: The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher; The World View of William James. It was grounding for me. James’s words significantly empowered my movement back to Self through my bodily experience. On the other hand I was unable to finish reading James’s magnum opus, The Varieties of Religious Experience for some reason. I think because, as he comments in ‘his’ afterdeath dictation, it wasn’t grounding to me. He was still very much disembodied mindfullness.

Some Jazz for you. Music: Tango Crash - Pararrango

I am laughing a little because I hadn’t thought of that book for a long time! Despite the name ‘William James’ coming up from time to time in my expanded ‘conspiracy’ researches, most recently the other night in a short documentary that talks about the peculiar timing of the powers-that-be releasing, or allowing to be released, ‘the truth’ about UFOs. The documentarians are asking why now? Why is it that UFO whistleblowers are popping up like dandelions in a newly sodded lawn despite the ability of those powers to keep it out of the ‘popular’ media as they have done for decades? Is it a part of the those powers looking to extend control of everything by elevating UFO’s as a kind of idol-stand-in for ‘religion’? ‘The Hidden Hand Behind UFOs Episode 1: Lifting The Esoteric Veil’ November 3, 2023’.

And both these events are a kind of synchronicity aligned with some of your interests. I remember the real excitement you and Laurence (grandfather) and uncles had with The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality by Joseph Chilton Pearce as if the meaning of life had been bestowed on you all. Hmmmm. And yet, like the Carlos Castaneda books that you loved and re-reread, I had no interest in it, nor Castaneda. Even then, I can see now, that despite the seeming totality of my brokenness some part of me was not cowed by family peer pressure to read what absolutely didn’t call to me. I think that Pearce’s and Castaneda’s writings exacerbated somatic disconnection. It is, perhaps, too easy to say that your death at 55 of suicide by alcohol and diet do suggest that you were completely disconnected from the physical joy that bodies have with being alive, if my current feelings from it are an example, and which has been described by many yogis.

And that vague unseen awareness of that young me has brought to mind something Lao Tzu wrote:

The virtue of the sage is to follow Tao and Tao alone.
What Tao is indeed is elusive and evasive.
Evasive and elusive, and yet it has the image.
Elusive and evasive, and yet it has the essence.
Profound and dark, and yet therein is the spirit.
Extremely real is this spirit and therein lies the evidence.
From ancient till now, it is called Tao and is the principle of all things.
Being in tune with Tao, the sage is aware of the world as it actually is.
     (Ch21 translated by Eichi Shmomisse, 1998, my emphasis.) 

Gai-Fu Feng and Jane English. Music: Paul Horn - Under the Pines

Did you read Lao Tzu? For some reason I think not, or at least not deeply, because The I Ching was an unopened book in your bookshelf. As I write this my remembrance of the popular Gai-Fu Feng Jane English translation being in your library is strengthening. That translation was popular at the time. I now remember opening it and thinking it was new and unread. This is likely a book attractive to intellectual philosophers, because it seems somehow pithy and erudite at the same time. I now understand that it isn’t comprehensible ,except superficially, when approached from the level of the intellect. Eventually I collected many translations and read and re-reread them eking out meaning that my mind was oblivious to. Mind has no capacity to find the truth of this space-time moment. And recent re-reads continue to surprise with newly discovered facets my body resonates with.

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An Omega and an Alpha?

What is next? I have no idea and with great curiosity have opened myself to ‘it’ and to respond with appropriate eccentric action. Am I actually learning the meaning of ‘to trust fall into the universe’, a phrase from Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati.

LoL! Would Saraswati’s manner drive you up the wall? [Headshake.] In a Tommy Rosen course I heard her say ‘trust fall into the Universe’. And why that phrase absolutely resonated with me, stayed with me. And now, six years or so since hearing it, I might be approaching some level of doing just that! Amazing.

With sincerity, your son somewhere in México.

guy

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and/or an ‘aha’, extend our human intimacy and become a paid subscriber.

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All the best with what is changing. Everything changes. Peace, respect, love and exuberant joy. 🙏

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Epistle’s Music: Miles Davis — Concierto de Aranjuez.

Music:Joaquín Rodrigo - Concierto De Aranjuez performed by Miles Davis

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No lyrics, so here is a poem instead.

God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night
Look round, brown moon, brown bird, as you rise to fly,
Look round at the head and zither
On the ground.

Look round you as you start to rise, brown moon,
At the book and shoe, the rotted rose
At the door.

This was the place to which you came last night,
Flew close to, flew to without rising away.
Now, again,

In your light, the head is speaking. It reads the book.
It becomes the scholar again, seeking celestial
Rendezvous,

Picking thin music on the rustiest string,
Squeezing the reddest fragrance from the stump
Of summer.

The venerable song falls from your fiery wings.
The song of the great space of your age pierces
The fresh night.
(p234 Wallace Stevens The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play.) 

Dear Reader, I appreciate that you shared with me today your precious time. I am honoured.

All the best with what is changing. Everything changes! With peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.

🙏❤️🧘‍♂️☯️🧘‍♂️❤️🙏

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